This hotel had been planned to come to the Disneyland Resort in 2021, but those plans were shelved by the company after the city of Anaheim said the project was no longer eligible for tax incentives. (Courtesy of the Walt Disney Co.)

Last week was an ugly one for both the Disneyland Resort and the City of Anaheim. Disneyland announced it was suspending plans to build a luxury hotel once the city revealed it would not honor a planned tax incentive for the development after Disney moved the hotel a few football fields south of its original site.

That’s not the real head-scratcher for me, though. The thing in this whole mess that gets me the most is: What is a city government doing giving out tax deals to help build more stuff for rich people? It’s not like the visitors who would be staying at Disneyland’s new luxury hotel should need government help to enjoy a vacation.

Heaven knows that there is plenty to fix in and around the Disneyland Resort. Traffic around the parking areas is a mess on many nights throughout the year. The new Star Wars land that opens next summer will bring even more people to the resort, further clogging roads and pushing up rates at local hotels. With just three high-end hotels on property, Disneyland doesn’t have any of the value-priced hotels to accommodate middle-class visitors that its sister Walt Disney World in Florida offers.

A new luxury hotel does not solve any of these problems. So why offer a tax deal to entice Disney to build one? For what it’s worth, Anaheim did not limit the offer to Disney. Other developers are planning luxury hotels to get the deal, too. Ultimately, city leaders were hoping that more luxury hotels will lure more big spenders to the city, spreading around more cash for everyone.

Again, though, Disneyland already has luxury hotels, and it’s not like Anaheim’s overflowing with money for schools, roads and other public services as a result. All over the country, people are growing more and more skeptical of tax giveaways that never seem to pay for themselves.

But a deal’s a deal. Disney believed it had one, which might be why it chose to develop a new luxury hotel instead of a mid-priced one. Setting aside whether tax deals are good or bad for a community, having a city government that people cannot trust to honor its commitments isn’t good for anyone.

The best way to stay out of a bad deal is to avoid offering it in the first place. If Anaheim’s leaders want to get out of the game of offering suspect tax breaks to wealthy businesses to build fancy stuff for rich customers, more power to them. But the city ought to honor the commitments that it has made and to work with companies investing in the community instead of looking for excuses to back out of deals.

Now Disney is offering the City of Anaheim an out, asking the city to rip up all its incentive deals, claiming that they have become too “divisive.” Is this a selfless act by Disney? Well, the fact that a November ballot issue raising the city’s minimum wage to $18 an hour for businesses that get such deals is totally coincidental, I am sure. Maybe Disney did some math and decided it is better off foregoing a tax break than potentially getting stuck having to pay its hourly employees a big raise.

Disney is right about one thing, though. Letting big companies pursuing rich clients play by a different set of rules than small businesses serving working customers stinks.